Learning the hard way

Education is but a business. And the amount of profit that lies in this business appalls me. It is not for nothing that people often say money has become more integral to learning rather than the desire to learn itself.



So, not surprisingly, there are hundreds of tutors out there, most of whom are happily employed in this employment-insecure era: Math tutors, English tutors, Physics, Chemistry tutors – name it, and they are there.[break]



In fact, chances are that even you have had your fair share of tutors who helped you get through school. I remember my parents often joking that it was thanks to the tutors rather than my schoolteachers who got me past my S.L.C. examinations. And I could not agree more.



Most of the people I know have taken tuitions, or know someone who takes tuitions. This can either mean that my acquaintances need more educational assistance as compared to the majority of the population, or that this is pretty much a common scenario. And if it is indeed the latter, then the situation begs the question: What kind of an educational system do we have?



It would be one thing if most of these students started taking tuitions in the higher level of their middle school education. However, it seems that children as young as ten or eleven years of age are also not immune to the pressures of school life. Additionally, it would be one thing if there was just one tuition teacher per child. However, it seems that more diverse the subjects, more the tutors. Hence, a child may potentially have more than one tutor.







Illustration: Sworup Nhasiju



In such a circumstance, where a child has studied for eight straight hours minus the commuting time, and the time she spends preparing for school, an added load of daily tuitions or tuitions over the weekend pretty much means that the child has no time to spare to explore other interest areas.



Moreover, the student not only has homework assigned from school but the tutors also add to the pile of assignments. Understandably, this is to help the students. However, help offered in such a pressurizing form can be overwhelming.



I understand that the world is competitive, and it will only get more competitive from here on. But this realization should not trigger an insane urge on the part of parents and guardians to make their children slug it all out in lure of better grades. Think of the mental and physical strains on the poor child as she sits through numerous hours of studies that she will likely not have to use nor remember in the future.



Surely, all this tutoring comes with hopes for a something good and the intention is not to torture the students. Nevertheless, we need to consider how our desire to help is affecting the students and how they are receiving this help.



There is also an additional issue that needs to be addressed here: while tutoring may be an option for folks with the means to afford it, it may not be so for the majority of the Nepali people. For the wider Nepal, spending thousands of extra Rupees on getting tuition teachers for their young ones may just not be feasible.



Of course, this inequality is a well-known fact. In fact, Roger Brown writes in The Guardian about educational access, “There is a basic question of fairness. The better-resourced universities generally recruit students from better-off backgrounds, including many educated at private, taxpayer-subsidized, fee-charging schools. So students who have already had the most spent on them up to the age of 18 continue to have the most spent on them, reinforcing their social and educational capital.”



With all this set in mind, we need to try to address the issue of how we can improve our educational system, and how we can make it equally accessible. We need to understand that quality education is a basic human right and therefore should be accessible to one and all.



The writer is student of Political Science at Thammasat University.

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